Like ‘A Scandalous Woman’, ‘The Need for Something Sweet’ is the story of a formative but unequal friendship. In its case, the narrator is a young man, and the person to whom he attaches an attractive older woman by the name of Anita Gonsales. When they first meet, through the man’s job at the Civil Service’s international telephone exchange, he sees romance in the woman’s attempts to contact her estranged husband in Spain. In his innocence, it signifies a life lived.
As they get sexually involved with one another, however, he soon realises the truth: that she is a sad, lonely alcoholic whom he is far too green to help. Fast-forward thirty-one years and we now find our narrator middle-aged, materially successful but no more happy in life and marriage than Anita Gonsales. The perplexing thing she said when they first met – “You don’t realise it will all happen to you” – now makes perfect, haunting sense to him.
First published in the New Review, January/February 1977. Collected in A Soldier’s Embrace, Jonathan Cape, 1980
A Personal Anthology 